/api-oreilly-free-books

Web Scraping to download books of the section "programming" from o'reilly free books

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

O'Reilly free programming books - Web API

This project was inspired in erikcaffrey's web application project used for expose O'Reilly free programming ebooks via a web API.

How does it works?

It is written in Python 2.7 using webapp2 and it's designed to be executed on Google App Engine. It also make use of Google Cloud Datastore to persist books data and a there is a cron job scheduled to run every 1 hour to go to O'Reilly's website and update books data by doing web scrapping.

That's basically it.

About the API

It is hosted on https://oreilly-api.appspot.com/ and the main resource is /books which after a GET request will expose you a JSON list with all available books. Each list element will look this:

Field Type Description
title String Book title
url String Book details URL
thumbnail String Book thumbnail URL
description String Book description
category String Book category
subcategory String/null Book subcategory. This can be either the subcategory name or null
pdf String/null Download URL (PDF). This can be either null or a URL
mobi String/null Download URL (MOBI). This can be either null or a URL
epub String/null Download URL (ePub). This can be either null or a URL

Usage

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

  1. Install Google App Engine SDK for Python from https://cloud.google.com/appengine/downloads
  2. Install lxml your local environment with: $ pip install lxml==2.3
  3. Run with: $ dev_appserver.py .

Deployment

Once you have set up your gcloud CLI in your local environment as well as your project in Google App Engine's console, you can simply run this for deployment.

$ glcoud app deploy

Built with

  • lxml: Used for HTML processing
  • webapp2: Python Web micro-framework.

Contributors

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details